Karen Webster

Apple Pay
The Real Reason Rite Aid Dumped Apple Pay
October 27, 2014

Ring, ring. Hi, Rite Aid. This is CurrentC (or a CurrentC rep) calling. You might not remember this since it was a few years and several marketing executives ago, but you signed a contract that pledged your undying and exclusive love to our own proprietary...

Apple Pay
The Scariest Things In Payments
October 27, 2014

The Scariest Things In Payments Friday is Halloween, a holiday in the U.S. that involves people – young and old – dressing up in (sometimes) scary costumes and going door to door “trick or treat-ing” for candy. It’s a pretty big deal where I live...

B2B Payments
What’s Next In Payments?
October 20, 2014

Oh, what a five years it has been! On October 20, 2009, Warren Buffet (via a recorded video interview) helped us launch a new way to talk about “What’s Next” in an ecosystem that was just beginning to pay attention to the power of the...

Karen Webster
Of Nobel Prizes And Payments
October 13, 2014

When explaining the economic “DNA” of Market Platform Dynamics, I always describe it as having its roots in the work of a genius French economist, Jean Tirole a long-time colleague of the two economists who also happen to be our Chairman and Founder, Dick Schmalensee...

In Depth
Why POS Players Should Be Nervous
October 13, 2014

The launch of Apple Pay has kept everyone in payments pretty busy speculating about its impact to others with digital wallet/account ambitions. What’s been ignored, at least so far, is the impact of Apple getting into payments on every other facet of the payments ecosystem....

Apple Pay
Icahn Gets Apple Pay Math Wrong
October 10, 2014

It’s way above my pay grade to weigh in on Carl Icahn’s proposal to Apple to accelerate its share buybacks. But the letter made for good reading, nonetheless. Someone did a whole lot of work to assemble a bunch of stats on Apple and its various products...

Apple Pay
Will Apple Pay Flip Debit To Credit?
October 06, 2014

There’s no doubt that Apple Pay has a lot going for it. It’s the payment method birthed by a beloved consumer brand and technology giant, it has the backing of the biggest payments players on the planet and it has those same players using their...

Cool
PayPal Sans eBay – Now What?
October 01, 2014

Just another Tuesday in September. In case you missed it, big news was made Tuesday (Sept. 30) in payments-land. eBay and PayPal will split and become two separate, publicly traded companies sometime late in 2015. There will be two new CEOs of these companies –...

Apple Pay and Mobile Payments’ Secret Weapon
September 29, 2014

The launch of Apple Pay has started a lot of conversations about winners and losers in the mobile payments space. The fact that Apple Pay launched with an NFC payments capability for in-store payments has everyone high-fiving over the notion of an NFC dominated mobile...